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Updated: June 24, 2025
A couple of cinchonas caught his eye. In one spot the undergrowth was rank and vividly green. The cassava, or tapioca plant, reared its high, passion-flower leaves above the grass, and some sago-palms thrust aloft their thick-stemmed trunks. "Here is a change of menu, at any rate," he communed. Breaking a thick branch off a poon tree he whittled away the minor stems.
This repeated proof that the most valuable of all the cinchonas, together with nearly every one of the others, were to be discovered in a small radius along the valley of the Cconi, filled the explorers with triumph, and demonstrated beyond a doubt the sagacity of Don Santo Domingo in organizing the expedition. The purpose and intention of the journey was now abundantly fulfilled.
Thomas of Angostura, as an excellent cinchona; and on the other hand, the bark of the common cherry tree, which has scarcely any febrifuge quality, yields a green precipitate like the real cinchonas. Leaving the ravine which descends from the Imposible, we entered a thick forest traversed by many small rivers, which are easily forded.
Such was Guapo's account of these curious animals which are found only in the warmer regions of North and South America. Conversing in this way, the bark-hunters, at length, reached the cinchona-trees, and then all talk about armadillos was at an end. They went lustily to their work which was of more importance and, under Guapo's axe, several of the cinchonas soon "bit the dust."
One of these specimens was a variety of the Carua-carua, with large leaves heavily veined: the other was an individual resembling those quinquinas which the botanists Ruiz and Pavon have discriminated from the cinchonas, to make a separate family called the Quinquina cosmibuena. After all, the discovery was rather an indication than a conquest of value.
It will at once strike the reader as desirable that specimens of cinchonas should be cultivated in hothouses under the influence of the electric light, in addition to that of the sun. If sunlight can be regarded as a factor in the formation of alkaloids in the living plant, it has, on the other hand, a decidedly injurious action upon the quinine in the bark stripped from the tree.
Some of the palms, as the great morichi, form an exception to this rule. These are found in vast palmares, or palm-woods, extending over large tracts of country, and monopolising the soil to themselves. Don Pablo, having spent the whole of a day in examining the cinchonas, returned home quite satisfied with them, both as regarded their quantity and value.
Before my history can teach anybody anything, or even interest myself, it must be disentangled from its materials, distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are but the pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still to be extracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are worth but one cask of quinine. A whole Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one vial of perfume.
At length, all things being ready, Don Pablo and party set out for a day's work among the cinchonas. As it was the first day of bark-gathering all went along to enjoy the novelty of the thing. A "mancha" of the cinchona-trees was not far off, so their journey would be a short one. It was a very early hour when they set out, for Don Pablo and his people were no sluggards.
This reputation is based on the abundance in that country of two species, the Cinchona calisaya and Boliviana, the best known and most valued in the market. But for two valuable cinchonas possessed by Bolivia, Peru can show twenty, many of them excellent in quality, and awaiting only the enterprise of the government and the natural exhaustion of the forests to the south.
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